Feds didn’t lose 1,475 kids. They lost…6,000?

Opinion: With no firm policy to keep track of unaccompanied migrant children who are place with sponsors there is no way to know for sure.

Trinidad Vargas holds on to Lucia Ajas, her mother as Lucia talks about her husband being deported during a rally against the zero-tolerance immigration policy outside the Sandra Day O'Connor Courthouse in Phoenix on June 18, 2018.(Photo: Patrick Breen/The Republic)

Last month the Department of Health and Human Services said it didn’t know the location of 1,475 children who had been taken into custody and then handed over to others. The administration arrived at the number after attempting to contact the sponsors of 7,635 kids. Of that number, 1,475, didn’t respond.

The thing is, during fiscal 2017 roughly 42,500 unaccompanied children were taken into custody then placed with sponsors.

My betters at McClatchy asked the Department of Health and Human Services for information on all of those children.

In an article the reporters wrote: HHS told McClatchy it didn’t have the data of unaccounted children in a reportable format. But based on its own estimates that 14 percent didn't return calls, some 5,945 unaccompanied children are likely unaccounted for.

Six-thousands kids.

The government got really angry when hacks like me started making noise about the initial batch of “lost” kids.

Officials said the children were not lost.

We tried to call them but...

They said the sponsors of the children simply didn’t respond to phone calls, so the government had no clear idea of their whereabouts.

They said that the government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement is not legally responsible for the children once they are handed over to a sponsor.

Not legally responsible?

I’m sorry, but once the U.S. government takes a child into custody I tend to believe we are responsible. Certainly in a moral sense. Certainly in a way that says children deserve our protection.

How is it that we don’t have a program to adequately keep track of these children and the people with whom we place them?

Would Arizona get away with this?

Imagine if a state like Arizona did that with a child placed in foster care?

Imagine if the state never checked on that child’s welfare, or said it wasn’t responsible if the child couldn’t be found.

Sadly, all of this was going on even before the Trump administration started separating children from their parents.

Everything the government has done at the border involving migrant children has been putting the cart before the horse.

We’ve handed off thousands of children without first establishing a plan to rigorously keep track of them and their welfare.